Love Skewers

These Skewers are perfect for a wedding reception or bridal shower. You can make a couple dozen for a wedding shower, or a couple hundred for a wedding. Choice of wood is yours but I recommend basswood. It’s inexpensive, it adds no taste to food and very easily accepts dye.

To make, just edit the included DXF file for your personnel pattern and you can cut as many as you need with a laser.

Now imagine this scenario. Tom and Cathy are getting married and on the groom's table, the groom's cake will be Red Velvet cupcakes. Cathy doesn't know that Tom is secretly making love skewers that say T heart C. Don't spill the beans.

You will want 1/8" basswood. It is available at most hobby shops. The piece I got is 3" wide and 24"

long. This gives a comfortable cutting area of 2-3/4" x 23-3/4" or 69mm x 603mm. If your laser doesn't cut wood this long, cut it into two 12" long pieces.

Basswood.

Open the attach DXF file with a DXF editor and you will find left and right skewers for each letter. (Your editor may be the software included with the laser.) For this example keep the left T and right C. Then place as many as will fit in a 603mm x 69mm rectangle. Save the pattern and you are ready to cut. For this size of wood I am ale to get 24 skewers or about 5 cents per skewer. And as wedding go, anything you can get for a nickel is cheap

Import your custom DXF file into your laser and cut out the skewers. After cutting I noticed the blanks have an interesting Art Deco type of styling. Purely an accident, but it is some to keep in the back of my mind for future projects.

After cutting, lightly sand with 180 grit sandpaper. I lay a sheet of sandpaper down on a flat surface and move the skewers to remove any laser burn.. Next you need to sharpen the tips of each skewer. This can easily be done when a power sander or sand by hand. I prefer to use my shop pencil sharpener. It goes really fast and you can delegate this job someone else. (Like the person that asked you to make 300 of them for a wedding.)

These don’t require any finish but you can dye them with a food safe dye. Since these will be used by the public you should sterilize them. You can soak them in a solution of 50-50 solution of white vinegar and water and let dry. (Easter egg dye is 50-50 vinegar water solution.) Another option is to place then in a 200 degree oven for 20 minutes. Place on a Pyrex tray or silicone mat. You can do this after baking something and use the residual heat from the oven.

Well Carol was pleasantly surprised and thought it was romantic in a typical Tom nerdy kind of way. This only confirmed her decision that after getting kicked to the curb a couple of times by those bad Boy Alpha Males types, the idea of waking up in the arms of a man that absolutely adores her and will always be there for her, doesn't sound all that bad. Tom was her first boyfriend to actually fix her car instead of borrowing money from her to get a slick audio system installed in their own cars before dumping her.

Tom was also happy. He realized she was really touched and knows he would be getting lucky tonight even if it wasn't his wedding night.

Carol now realizes the Tom is a master of stuff and can fix anything. She has already promised five of her friends that he will make skewers for their weddings. Of course not as nice as hers.

Tom will have a honey-do list that included fixing problems for his wife's friends. He will slowly come to the conclusion that he now has the curse of the handy.